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kacked.com

Been working on the comics part of my site [again].
Still have that goal of publishing a new one once a day.
At least on school days.
You know --Monday through Friday.
To give everybody a reason to show up and sniff around when they should be doing something else.

Wrote a bash script (that will run using cron) to publish a new comic each night at midnight.
All I need to do now is to make a bunch of new ones and put them in the "hold for publish" directory.
The script will do the rest.
It even sends me an email when I get close to running out.

I also need to update the look of the comics page --get it reintegrated with the new look of the rest of the site.

Looked around a little to see if there was some photoblogging software I could use.
Couldn't find anything that worked as well as the way I hacked blosxom to work publishing images rather than text.
And it's easier to keep the different sections of the site in sync as far as look and feel go.
Since they're both running on blosxom...

I plan to add a feature to the backend scripts where they alter a redirect at the root so that whatever the latest content is becomes the front page.
What does that mean?
Well, if I write something and it's newer than the latest comic, that's what you'll see when going to /

I liked the old design I had for the site.
I didn't like the way it looked on my roommate's computer.
It had problems rendering properly on IE and Firefox.
It might have something to do with the lower screen resolution he's running at.

I figured it didn't look right for most people that came to the site.
Even though I had installed IE on my linux desktop machine and previewed it --it looked fine on IE on linux...

So, that's the deal with the new look.
Hopefully it's more compatible with Internet Explorer in general (since that's what most people still use --why they still use it is another question.)

The color scheme kind of sucks but it's the best I could do yesterday.
Put some more work into it soon.

Couple weeks back I switched my email setup over to the new web server.
I kinda liked the idea of having a separate email server --not keeping all my eggs in one basket, and like that.
But then my chess filter thing wouldn't work.

Anthony was giving me shit about the chess filter, saying nobody cares about seeing my last chess game on my web site.
As if I didn't know that already, ha!
It was a learning exercise. An experiment in generating content automatically.

Anyway, I just got it working again.
Bunch of stuff was broken. The path in my .procmailrc wasn't allowing the recipe to see stuff like cat and sed.
And the recipe had some carriage returns in it.
All that stuff needs to be on one line.

The biggest problem I had though was I had left fetchmail running on the old server.
No wonder fetchmail on the new box wasn't collecting anything from my pop mail accounts --the old server was grabbing the emails before the new one could.
Heh. As M. Emmet Walsh tells Dan Hedeya in "Blood Simple": "you look stupid now".

What the heck is the chess filter thing?
It's that chess game graphic down there on the left side.
Whenever I play a game on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), after finishing, the game is automatically emailed to me in PGN notation.
The filter takes these emails (which are text files) and generates the graphic which shows the final position, who won, stuff like that.

Finally shit-canned the irc chatroom I had been running for a couple of years.
It was amusing and provided some learning experience.
But got to be a drag.
Occasionally someone new would login using a real client and hang out for a while.
Mostly though people stopped by using the chat interface.
This got really annoying.
People would click on the chatroom link on my web site and since it's a web site (after all) expect the chat part to happen in "web time".
People have a tendency to be very impatient when using the web. This doesn't really work well on IRC.

Anyway, I ended up feeling like a monkey in a box --every now and then someone would stop to bang on my bars. Never sticking around long enough for a reply. One way conversations are not that exciting for me (or you, for that matter.)
The average visit would be a couple of minutes at most, I would talk to people about it later and they would say stuff like: "I tried your chatroom but you're never around", etc.

I appreciate my buddy Michael hanging with the experiment as long as he did. He would hang out in there and basically it was our own private chatline.
I wanted it to be more than that but there never seemed to be any type of critical mass of bodies.
Maybe I'll try again once that rock star gig comes thru.